The Destiny “beta was water wings”, months of “compelling content” in final game

Destiny developer Bungie has responded to furious debate over how much content the final game contains, promising the answer is lots and lots.

The Destiny beta contained just a handful of story missions and – for the most part – one environment. It was pretty easy to speed through the content on offer, and that left many fans wondering how weighty the final game would be for those not interested in PvP.

Yesterday, we got a partial answer to that question. Bungie confirmed that it has revealed every destination in the game (Earth, the moon, Mars and Venus) and that each destination will only have one environment – so there’s nowhere to go on Earth except the cosmodrome, for example.

That doesn’t necessarily mean there won’t be plenty to do, of course. Data miners pulled out some idea of the game’s scope from the beta files, granting us a vague, likely to be updated vision of how many missions Destiny has.

Following this, Bungie community manager Eric “Urk” Osborne took to NeoGAF to address discussion of the leak and the number of destinations in the game.

“Destiny’s pretty big. It’s the biggest game we’ve ever made, by far, and we’re sort of known for making games you can play for months, years, and even decades if you’re a little bit dedicated,” he said.

“If we’re fortunate enough to have you playing months after launch, you still find lots of compelling stuff to do. That will manifest itself in a myriad of ways, from straight up content to cool activities we’ve yet to show off.”

“With Destiny, we’re looking to exceed what we’ve done before, not just in terms of scale – the Moon is our smallest destination – but in terms of scope and breadth of activities.”

Osborne said that’s “true for day one”, but that Bungie wants “Destiny to have super long legs”.

“If we’re fortunate enough to have you playing months after launch, you still find lots of compelling stuff to do,” he said.

“That will manifest itself in a myriad of ways, from straight up content to cool activities we’ve yet to show off.”

Osborne also said that Bungie was disappointed that it could only cater to competitive PvP players with post-launch support for the Halo series.

“We wanted to do better. So, Destiny is philosophically built support every type of player, and all modes with ongoing activities and events,” he said.

“We look at it quite a bit like television programming, as opposed to a singular film, as we had in the past.”

During beta, Bungie presented a range of content and did a lot of testing, Osborne added, but the full game will be a different beast indeed.

“Beta was water wings. Level 8 is nothing. You barely scratched the surface, and it seems like some folks had fun with what was there.